On November 19, 2022, it was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov, who deciphered the Maya script. The Maya writing resembles a wordless comic strip more than a conventional text. On walls, pots, and stones, American Indians are depicted doing everyday things: watching the stars, celebrating victories, commemorating the dead. Attempts to crack this code began in the first half of the 19th century, when Jean-François Champollion managed to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone by comparing the same inscription in three languages. There was nothing to compare the Maya texts with, making the task much harder for scientists. Some, like the Frenchman Léon de Rosny, came close to the solution but no further. The German researcher Paul Schellhas, despairing, even wrote an article near the end of his life titled "Deciphering the Maya Script — An Insoluble Problem."

This article caught the eye of a history faculty student at Moscow State University, Yuri Knorozov. He was spurred on by Schellhas’s challenge: "How can it be an insoluble problem? What was created by one human mind cannot fail to be deciphered by another. From this perspective, there are no and cannot be insoluble problems in any field of science!"

The spirit of challenge and stubbornness were in Knorozov’s character from childhood. He was born on November 19, 1922, into the family of an engineer who had been sent from Petersburg to Kharkov before World War I to build southern railways. However, Knorozov himself claimed he was actually born on August 31. He did not celebrate these birthdays but expected congratulations twice a year. Although his name corresponds to one of the Georges in the saints’ calendar, whose day is celebrated in November.

The Knorozov family were typical Russian intellectuals. All their children became scientists working in various fields. Two became doctors of science and state prize laureates, two became candidates of science. Only his sister Galina, who developed pharmaceuticals, could not defend her thesis because during the Great Patriotic War she was in territory occupied by the enemy.

In childhood, Yuri played the violin, drew beautifully, wrote romantic poetry, and relieved neighbors’ pains by "laying on of hands." In fact, these were his experiments with hypnosis. Recalling his school years, Knorozov would tell with some pleasure how they tried to expel him for bad behavior. However, his school record shows he graduated with excellent grades, with the only B’s in Ukrainian language. In 1938, Knorozov was declared unfit for military service due to health. This deeply upset him, as his father and older brothers were all officers. In 1939, Knorozov enrolled in the history faculty of Kharkov State University but completed only two years before the war broke out. Along with other students, he was sent to the militia to dig trenches, but it was pointless: the Germans advanced rapidly. His father, who was in charge of evacuating factories from Ukraine, left with the last train. Yuri barely made it back to his native village Yuzhny, where he, his mother, and sister had to live in a shed. Only in February 1943, with the advance of Soviet troops, did Knorozov lead his mother and sister through the front line toward Voronezh. He went to the military enlistment office, but even there, in the midst of war, he was declared unfit for military service and sent to teach in a rural school. But Yuri fell ill with typhus, and his father, who found him, took him to Moscow, where, with difficulty, he helped him recover, losing a year at the ethnography department of the history faculty at Moscow State University.

Officially, his thesis topic was shamanism. But it was at this time that he seriously began deciphering the Maya script, thanks to the Lenin Library, which had the necessary literature and was just a few steps from the building on Mokhovaya Street. A year later, Knorozov was sent to a training camp near Moscow, from which he regularly escaped to visit female classmates, and he was demobilized only at the end of the war. Around that time, he read Schellhas’s article about the insoluble problem of the Maya script.

At the same time as Knorozov, attempts to decipher the Maya script were underway in the USA, but the head of the American school of Mayan studies, Eric Thompson, went down a false trail and, moreover, forbade everyone else from working on decipherment. He dogmatically and ignorantly declared: "Maya signs usually convey words, occasionally, perhaps, syllables of complex words, but never, as far as is known, alphabet letters." Knorozov thought differently, and Thompson was no authority for him. At university, Knorozov translated from Old Spanish into Russian the "Report on the Affairs in Yucatan," a book about Maya life during the Spanish conquest, written in 1566 by the Franciscan monk Diego de Landa. It is believed that de Landa based his book on the works of an Indian with European education named Gaspar Antonio Chi. Knorozov guessed that the Indian recorded not sounds but the names of Spanish letters using Maya signs, and that the 29-sign alphabet in the "Report" was the key to deciphering the mysterious writing.

First, Knorozov needed to determine what kind of writing it was. Humanity invented not many ways to record speech. The most convenient is the alphabet, where each sign represents a sound. Alphabetic writing consists of about 30 signs. Another method is when a sign represents a syllable, as in the Indian Devanagari script. Syllabic writing usually has 80 to 100 signs. The third type is ideographic writing, where a sign represents a whole concept. Although even the simplest version contains over 5,000 signs, it is still used by the Chinese.

Knorozov had three fairly long Maya manuscripts at hand. He counted that they contained a total of 355 independent signs, meaning the writing was syllabic, or more precisely, phonetic. This did not contradict the work of predecessors or the records of Diego de Landa. Using Landa’s alphabet as a key, Knorozov was able to read some signs. Che-e — this is how the word "che," meaning tree, is written in the Madrid manuscript. Che-le — "chel," rainbow, the name of the goddess Ix Chel. K’i-k’i — k’ik’ — balls of fragrant resin; ma-ma — this is how the name of the divine ancestor Mam is written in the Dresden manuscript. Over time, the number of readable signs grew, but this was only the beginning. Next, it was necessary to master the font and individual handwriting of the Maya scribes to recognize all variants of hieroglyphs, even partially erased and distorted ones. After that, Knorozov separated roots and other parts of words, then analyzed how often signs repeated and combined — this allowed him to identify function words, main and secondary sentence members. At this stage, it was easy for Knorozov to guess the general meaning of sentences. He checked the correctness of the decipherment using "cross-reading." The idea is that the same sign is read the same way in different words, these words form meaningful sentences, which in turn do not contradict the entire text. Knorozov found several suitable examples.

u-lu —> ul, "to come";

u-lu-um —> ulum, "turkey";

ku-tsu —> kuts, "turkey";

tsu-lu —> tsul, "dog".

These examples were often confirmed by accompanying scenes depicting a turkey or a dog.

The decipherment of the Maya script stretched over several years. During this time, Knorozov defended his diploma on shamanism and planned to enter graduate school, but he was rejected both at Moscow State University and the Institute of Ethnography. Like his sister Galina, Yuri was recalled for having been in enemy-occupied territory during the war. Even his supervisors — leading ethnographers Sergey Tolstov and Sergey Tokarev — could not help. The only thing they managed was to send Knorozov to the Leningrad Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR. As Yuri ironically noted himself, he was dusting Turkmen carpets. Knorozov settled in a small museum room, and for several months before his next arrest, his neighbor was the scholar Lev Gumilev, son of Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. Knorozov turned the room into a small personal kingdom, covering the space from floor to ceiling with drawings of Maya signs. It was here, in the early 1950s, that the decipherment was completed. In 1952, his first publication dedicated to the results of this incredible work was released. In 1955, Tolstov organized Knorozov’s dissertation defense. The young researcher was immediately awarded a doctoral degree, and the scientific world began to regard him as a genius and the country’s hope. After that, Knorozov continued working at the Kunstkamera, where he remained until the end of his life. News of the decipherment quickly spread abroad. In 1956, academician Alexey Okladnikov obtained permission for Knorozov to attend the International Congress of Americanists in Copenhagen. Yuri’s report made a strong impression on the attendees, and the all-powerful Eric Thompson, by his own admission, had his blood pressure spike as soon as he heard about the audacious Russian. But Knorozov himself had no idea what a storm of hatred his success caused in the head of the American school of Mayan studies, who immediately realized who had won the victory.

Many scientists worldwide supported the discovery and became "Knorozovists," as they were called by Yale University professor Michael Coe. He even came to St. Petersburg to meet Knorozov personally. In his book "Breaking the Maya Code," Coe described the Soviet scientist as follows: "The most remarkable feature of Knorozov’s face was his sapphire-colored eyes, deeply set beneath bushy eyebrows. If I were a 19th-century physiognomist, I would have said with certainty that these eyes expressed extraordinary intellect… Despite his stern appearance, Yuri Valentinovich possessed an ironic, almost mischievous sense of humor and occasionally allowed a smile to appear on his face, as if it were a ray of sunshine breaking through black clouds. Like many Russians, Knorozov was a heavy smoker, and his fingers bore deep nicotine stains."

Never having been to Mexico, never leaving his office, the Soviet researcher achieved what scientists conducting years of field research in Central America could not. Knorozov himself ironically remarked: "I am a desk scientist. To work with texts, there is no need to climb pyramids." Knorozov’s scientific achievements in the 1960s were valued in the USSR on par with successes in space exploration, but his fame irritated and hindered his work. When a film crew came again to the Kunstkamera to shoot a story about the decipherment, Knorozov tied a pirate’s eye patch over his eye and appeared before the crew in that guise.

Knorozov worked tirelessly. He set many tasks for himself: reading numerous Maya texts, deciphering other writing systems, developing theories related to the brain’s signaling and fascination, and his main research goal was a systemic theory of the collective. In the 1980s, Knorozov added another topic — the peopling of America. In his opinion, the Kuril Islands were a gateway to Beringia, the route by which the ancestors of the Indians crossed the exposed ocean floor toward the New World. According to his hypothesis, the continent began to be settled 40,000 years BC, that is, 20,000 years earlier than was believed at the time.

For a long time, Knorozov was considered unable to travel abroad. He could only laugh at the endless commissions formed to discuss trips to Mexico, all of whose members had already been there. But in 1989, something unexpected happened — Knorozov was allowed to go on an invitation from the president of Guatemala. There, he was taken to the main Maya sites. Before the trip, which he did not believe in until the very arrival, Knorozov repeated that he knew all the archaeological sites perfectly well from publications. Nevertheless, he climbed the Tikal pyramid and stood alone for a long time in thought at the very top, smoking continuously. In 1995, Knorozov was awarded the Silver Order of the Aztec Eagle for exceptional services to Mexico. Upon receiving the award, he said in Spanish: "In my heart, I will always remain a Mexican." After that, he flew several times to this country at the invitation of the National Institute of History and Anthropology. There he visited the most cherished places: Palenque, Bonampak, Yaxchilan, Chichen Itza, La Venta, Monte Albán, Teotihuacan, Xochicalco. Knorozov never ceased to marvel at the respect shown to him by ordinary Mexicans.

The great scientist died on March 30, 1999. He died alone in the corridor of a city hospital. A crowd gathered at his farewell; people could not fit into the cramped morgue. Knorozov liked the Alexander Nevsky Lavra very much, but he was buried in the Kovalevsky cemetery. Snow fell on the cold clay mixture, seagulls cried.

Sources:

https://nauka.tass.ru/nauka/16359301

https://www.culture.ru/materials/257009/tainy-maiya-kak-sovetskii-uchenyi-rasshifroval-yazyk-drevnei-civilizacii?ysclid=lbtkfccp4p569248924

Photo © Irina Fedorova